I’ve found some new software projects utilizing T-Beam LoRa boards that I want to try out (posts coming soon). I’ve got a handful of these boards lying around and they are quite fun to experiment with. Over the years, I’ve played around with Meshtastic and several other packages including TinyGS. The TinyGS project is a global network of groundstations that listen for LoRa packets from satellites, weather balloons, and other flying objects.

Last week a coworker gave me a mostly complete MPCNC. The MPCNC or Mostly Printed CNC is a inexpensive open source CNC platform. My coworker was having trouble getting it working and opted to purchase a premade CNC machine instead. He offered it to me and I happily accepted. This is what it looked like when he brought it in. It was mostly working as it stood. I was able to power it on and move it around using the web interface from the ESP32 based FluidCNC controller.

This past weekend, while playing around with my antenna setup and my new FTDX10, I needed to do some SWR measurements. I have a few SWR meters laying around, but I also had this MFJ tuner sitting on the shelf doing nothing. It had a nice cross needle meter as well as an integrated coax switch which would be useful for switching between my antenna and a dummy load. I don’t necessarily need the tuner parts, but this unit is about the same size as the FTDX10 and they stack nicely atop one another, so I figured I’d use this.

The other day on mastodon.radio, I saw a post about AREDN, or the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network. I had heard of it before, but never really looked into it, and to be honest, still haven’t really look into it too deeply, but it looked like something I’d be interested in. After a quick poke around on the AREDN website, I hopped on eBay and bought two hAP ac lites (the first device listed on the supported devices list).

I am currently in the process of building an 80 meter SSB rig modeled off of a series of ZL2CTM’s homebrew videos. I’ve added in some relays for transmit/receive switching and added a multi-stage power amplifier, the schematics of which are below. I mostly copied Charlie’s work, but I substituted a handful of components for things I had on hand. The schematics below show the values that I used, but Charlie’s version had better performance than mine, so I’d suggest watching his videos if you want to follow along.

Over the weekend, I continued working on my homebrew 80 metter SSB rig, but I ran into a few issues. While working on the output amplifier, I ended up burning out multiple resistors, trimpots, diodes, and transistors. I was getting frustrated, but luckily, a package arrived that shifted my attention. My new FTDX10. I made a few contacts on FT8 and I was able to successfully decode Olivia on 20 meters, but thunderstorms started to roll in, so I jumped off before I could join in the conversation.